The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

years old, but three months later, she was already gliding through the aisles of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in a tailored green wool suit beneath a full-length beaver coat, with matching green suede heels. She was an understudy in two Broadway plays and feeling like it was “the most exciting moment of my life.”

Nanette Emery felt much the same. She planned to make her New York entrance in a knockoff of the latest “it” dress, the Townley frock by Claire McCardell. McCardell was an American designer inspired by American tastes and traditions. She had blossomed under the restrictions of World War II, when American designers were cut off from Paris, traditionally fashion’s epicenter. Among her innovations was a modernized dirndl—the full, wide skirt with a cinched-in waist—and in 1944, she created the ultimate patriotic dress by utilizing government surplus weather-balloon cottons. A year later, McCardell, much like Phyllis Lee Schwalbe, was trying to envision what lay ahead following victory over fascism. Her 1945 collection showcased American pioneering values: she made full use of what she called frontier pants pockets, which she placed on both her trousers and skirts, where they jutted out at provocative sharp angles. (Just two years later, this nod toward the liberating life of the American frontier would give way to Christian Dior’s iconic “New Look.” At first, American women balked at his overt return to restrictive femininity: skirts just inches from the floor, tightly belted, a bosom in seemingly military uprightness, and all the painful foundation garments that that pertness required. Yet the New Look quickly trumped McCardell’s earlier postwar vision.)

But it was still 1945, McCardell was very much in fashion, the war in Europe had finally ended, and Nanette was heading to the Barbizon. The air was full of questions that were waiting to be answered and a postwar optimism that was infectious. Joseph Stalin was still being referred to as “Uncle Joe,” the Cold War was not yet in clear sight, and it would be five years before Senator McCarthy unleashed his witch hunt for covert communists. In this immediate moment, what the Depression and then the Second World War had taught Nanette and her friends was that fun was fleeting and they should grab it while they could.

Schwalbe wrote to Nanette and the other thirteen guest editor winners that they would be the second group housed at the Barbizon. She noted that “last year our Apprentice Editors enjoyed living a kind of dormitory-hotel life at the Barbizon Hotel for Women,” but she also warned that “you must be prepared to accept whatever accommodations there are available.” Along with Schwalbe’s letter, Nanette received the Barbizon brochure, a thick-paged, beautifully photographed presentation of where she would be living, which looked far from a “dormitory-hotel.” The brochure offered glamorous shots of the library, the music room, and the sunny solarium among the hotel’s turrets. The hotel stationery suggested both luxury and femininity: the name, The Barbizon, topped the sheet of delicate paper, drawn out in a perfect, feminine curly script, with small block letters below for the address—LEXINGTON AVENUE AT 63RD STREET, NEW YORK 21, N.Y. From there on, until the program’s end in 1979, every group of guest editors would stay at the Barbizon.

Phyllis Lee Schwalbe advised Nanette and the other contest winners that “your wardrobe will best be cool, dark city clothes for work,” and that “MLLE’s own pet taboos are hatlessness and white shoes.” Schwalbe’s message was loud and clear: these fourteen young women, chosen to be guest editors from all across the United States, were to show up in sophisticated New York fashions and not their hometown looks. Schwalbe’s concern was warranted. The writer Diane Johnson, author of a string of successful novels including Le Divorce, guest editor in 1953 at the age of nineteen, was typical in that she had never been “east of the Mississippi.” For her, the requisite hat worn by Blackwell and all the other successful New York women was entirely alien: “Hats were known, of course, in my hometown of Moline, Illinois; I can see my mother putting hers on to go downtown or on occasion (Easter) to church.” But standing before the Mademoiselle staff upon arrival, Diane and her fellow guest editors (including Sylvia Plath), while excellent students and ambitious young women, were not exactly glamour personified: “Twenty girls from California and Utah and Missouri—our clothes turned those editors pale, our hats dismayed, timid churchgoing lids borrowed from our mothers.”

While the GEs were expected to have new hats and new clothes, the Mademoiselle program was not exactly lucrative summer work, and those without extra means were often left hanging, looking to borrow, while everyone else was writing home to ask for money to be wired ASAP. Nanette, like the others, would receive $150 for the month of June, a sum that—rather cleverly—legally covered “payment for all photographic modeling for MADEMOISELLE, for short stories, articles, ideas or artwork accepted for publication.” One hundred and fifty dollars, while more than adequate for girls like Nanette who could afford to bring more for extras, barely covered the month’s expenses, especially when many costs came up front whereas Mademoiselle’s first paycheck only arrived midmonth. (The sum of $150—before taxes—would not change for another nine years until finally, in 1954, the GEs got a pay raise of $25 when it was pointed out that by then it cost $60 to stay at the Barbizon for the month, and when compared to college graduates starting their first jobs in the city, and getting paid $195 while paying $30 to $40 for small apartments or apartment group shares, it just did not add up.)

Nanette, with the luxury of not having to worry about the $150 paycheck, was determined to make June 1945 exactly as she had imagined it. Nanette stayed in room 1411 at the Barbizon, receiving frequent telephone messages from the operator, which she picked up from the front desk whenever she returned home. Her friends trying to reach her at